We are honoured that STOXX has been named most innovative index provider by readers of etfexpress. Winning this award shows us that the market acknowledges our own perception, that STOXX has become the leading European index provider due to its commitment to innovation.

STOXX has a heritage of designing innovative indices that has led to our success in Europe. Founded in 1998 with the vision to create pan-European indices that would allow investors to track the performance of blue chips across the newly established Eurozone, STOXX has become the brand for innovative indices. Our indices are rules-based, transparent and sophisticated, which makes them ideal underlyings for financial products.

The most recent testimonial of our commitment to innovation is the launch of the STOXX Europe 600 Optimised Market Quartile Indices, an addition to the STOXX Optimised Index family, of which the well-known STOXX Europe 600 Optimised Supersector Indices are also part.

One of the defining features of the indices in this family is that they are the first to take into account the ability to borrow a stock in the stock lending market, a key component in facilitating active trading in the underlying index constituents and related products. Moreover, they also implement a special liquidity screening process in the selection of components. Innovations such as the STOXX Optimised Indices have been designed especially with the investment community and the tradability of financial products based on indices in mind.

We recently removed the ‘Dow Jones’ prefix from the name of all STOXX indices to reflect STOXX’s new ownership structure. Last December 2009, Deutsche Börse and SIX Group acquired the shares of STOXX previously owned by Dow Jones & Company.

With this change in ownership, STOXX now finally has a chance fully to expand its index range on a global level and across all asset classes, beyond the existing STOXX Global 1800 global equity index. We have also renamed all our indices for the European region to clearly label them as Europe-focused indices. This has been done with the future launch of further global indices in mind.

From now on, STOXX is present in the market with new power, new index names and without any limits.

Going forward, STOXX will expand its European success story to a global level, developing innovative, transparent and rules-based indices not only for all regions but for all asset classes. In the long run, the goal is to combine the shareholders’ index offerings with that of STOXX. They already offer a well-known and popular range of indices covering longevity, commodities and fixed income, as well as a wide range of equity and highly sophisticated strategy indices.

Currently, STOXX holds fifth position among index providers globally in the ETF segment in terms of assets under management. Considering that STOXX has so far been limited in growth by the structure of the previous joint venture, the growth potential now, under the new shareholding structure, is tremendous.

Innovative ETFs rely on a rules-based and transparent index methodology, a strong brand name of index provider, and sophisticated, innovative index concepts. STOXX offers all that – and more.